Marketing campaigns or projects are an essential tool in marketing products and services to customers. In a conventional marketing project, a marketing group or the like identifies characteristics of select customers that might be interested in purchasing a particular product or service. This can be a difficult task, and one that can substantially effect the efficacy of the marketing project. Once the customers of interest are identified, an appropriate medium is selected to reach those customers. For example, if a product is a sport related product, the marketing project may provide advertising in sport related magazines, at sporting related events, or on sports related web sites, to name just a few. Using a direct marketing approach, the customers of interest may be directly contacted through, for example, a direct mailing or a phone call.
Determining the efficacy of a marketing project can be difficult. In many cases, the efficacy of a marketing project is estimated by simply monitoring the overall sales of a product both before and after the marketing project is executed. This, however, only provides a macro view of the merits of the marketing project, and does little to identify ways to improve the marketing project. Also, the efficacy of the marketing project often cannot be determined until well into or after the marketing project is executed, which makes it difficult to assess the efficacy of the marketing project on a short term basis. Also, the ability to provide marketing information to product distributors is hit or miss at best.